The supplement industry generates a staggering amount of single-use plastic. We made a decision early on: Happy Pills wouldn't add to it.
plastic supplement bottles avoided every year — six daily supplements, six refills each, multiplied across 30,000 people.
That's roughly 30 tonnes of avoided plastic and packaging waste — the weight of two and a half London double-decker buses. At 100,000 subscribers, the number rises to 3.6 million bottles a year.
The average person taking a proper daily supplement regimen — a multivitamin, Vitamin D, Omega-3, Magnesium, Iron, B12 — gets through roughly 36 plastic bottles a year. Six different supplements, replaced every couple of months. That's three plastic bottles every month, every year, going into the household waste stream.
Most of those bottles are HDPE — technically recyclable, practically not. UK kerbside recycling rates for small HDPE supplement containers sit below 30%. The rest end up in landfill, in incinerators, or in the waste export stream that ends up somewhere it shouldn't.
That's just the bottle. Then there's the plastic safety seal, the cotton wool wadding (often non-recyclable), the desiccant pack, the silica gel sachet, and frequently a plastic measuring cup or scoop. Each bottle generates around 28 grams of waste, of which less than 10 grams will ever be properly recycled.
Multiply 36 bottles by tens of millions of UK supplement users, by years of repeat purchasing, and you have a small mountain of plastic generated entirely by a category that is supposed to be about health.
Sustainability is easy to claim and harder to deliver. Here are the specific commitments we've made, against which we'll measure ourselves publicly every year.
The box, the strip, the inserts — all paper or cardboard. No plastic film. No plastic windows. No exceptions, no compromises.
Tablets manufactured in the UK. Packaging printed in the UK. Boxes assembled in the UK. Shorter supply chains, lower carbon footprint, and full traceability.
No van trips. No "sorry we missed you" cards. No second delivery attempts. The most carbon-efficient way to get a small parcel to a UK home.
From year one, we'll publish a yearly sustainability report — bottles avoided, carbon footprint, supplier audits. The good and the things we still need to fix.
We don't believe in greenwashing. There are bits of our supply chain we haven't fully solved yet, and we'd rather be straight about them.
The tablets themselves contain trace excipients — binders, fillers, and coatings that help the active ingredients hold together and absorb properly. We use the cleanest, most established excipients available, but they're not 100% naturally derived. We're working with our manufacturer on next-generation alternatives.
The Omega-3 capsules are gelatin-based, which means they're not vegan-friendly. A plant-based alternative is in development for our second product run.
Our carbon footprint is not yet measured. We'll commission a full lifecycle analysis once we hit 5,000 subscribers and report the results — including the bits we don't like.
Sustainability is a direction of travel, not a finish line. We'd rather make real, measurable progress than make claims we can't back up.
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